Online Tracking Blockers

Whenever you visit a site, chances are it installs cookies on you computer, these can be used to track what other sites you visit and beam the information back to the mothership, which can then sell the information to advertisers or use it to serve ads itself, including the kind that seem to follow you around from website to website. Enter tracking blockers. These add-ons for web browsers silently block cookies attempts to track you by preventing them from phoning home to report the data they gather. Here are three easy-to-use options to choose from:


DoNotTrackMe

Made by Abine, this tool is probably the simplest of the three (and meant to be so). The icon shows the number of trackers blocked on any particular site, and the drop-down menu shows a graph displaying the total number of tracking attempts blocked. In addition, there is a small dialogue box at the bottom that prompts you to click and learn more about a particular tracking company. Overall, it's drop-dead simple to use, you can get it here. If you're interested, Abine also has some other privacy tools worth looking into.

Disconnect

Disconnect brings all the same functionality of DNTM and then goes just a bit further, adding the ability to secure your wi-fi connections, and short cuts for enabling/disabling common social networks on a particular site, or white/blacklisting entire sites. Visually it is more streamlined than DNTM, giving it some added appeal. Though it doesn't tally blocked tracking attempts, instead it shows a small graph displaying the amount time & bandwidth saved from using the extension on loading the current page. Currently it is the favourite tracking blocker of this blogger, you can download it for yourself here.

Ghostery

Ghostery may be the most user-friendly of the three...or annoying, depending on how you feel about a pop-up style list of blocked and unblocked trackers on whatever page you just loaded. Mercifully, this can be turned off in the settings. Like DNTM, Ghostery gives you a list of the trackers on the current page and the option to block/unblock them or whitelist the site. Unlike DNTM, it has a one-word description under the name of the tracker telling you if it's an advertiser, beacon, widget, analytics, etc, to help you decide if that element needs to be blocked or not. You can find it here.